Alto Knights: The Rotten Cannoli of the Gangster Micro-Universe

Year 1990. While your nonna cooks fettuccine in a huge pot with the classic pomodoro sauce and stew, your mom asks you to grab the wine, fizzy water, sodas and put them on the table. The table has no cloth so you ask your grandpa where it is. Your dad is chopping garlic in small pieces for the sauce, and the dogs bark at the entrance. You step away because you understand the concentration needed for such a culinary task.

Your grandpa glances at you while closely watching the Formula One race on the 14″ TV. While focusing on the box emitting cathode rays, he screams at you: "Ask your uncle!" You don't know where he is, so you wander around the whole house—almost like the cameraman who follows Ray Liotta and his girlfriend in a magnificent single shot of the movie I will be commenting on next—and you find him taking a look at a magazine which seems to have pictures of naked women.

You know you can't nor shouldn't interrupt, you are completely astonished, and there's a certain complicity when you look at each other… so you decide to search on your own.

The tablecloth, stored among the general knowledge magazines your grandpa hoards and other useless stuff, has gathered dust that, even though it can't be seen, it can be smelled. You sneeze loudly and then turn around, finding almost everyone sitting at the table. They laugh at the situation, you blush and, innocently, let out a grin similar to a smile. After pigging out, your uncle crops some trees in the backyard, your grandpa makes some tea and your grandma turns the TV on, which had been off for lunch time. While looking for something to watch, you see the announcement of a new Martin Scorsese movie on a cable channel.

In the movie, three men in a car hear a noise in the trunk that makes them exit the road late at night. When they realize the man they thought to be dead is still breathing, one of them takes out a huge kitchen knife and makes sure he stays dead. The image is shocking. And the other man riddles him with bullets just to be sure. The screen turns red and, after 145 minutes of pure criminal ecstasy, something changes inside you: in a certain way, you believe that, since you can remember, you have always wanted to be a gangster. You have just watched Goodfellas, and now life feels different.

This could have been a personal memory, but I was born in 1992. I didn't watch my friend Marty's masterpiece until I reached a considerable age, but this could have easily been me. Because yes! I was raised among pasta Sundays with my grandma, my mom listening to claims about an unresolved past, my grandpa glued to the TV and the whole family shebang on the weekends. I simply imagine a young man who, due to economic or scheduling issues, couldn't watch that amazing movie on the big screen and I feel sorry for him.

Cinema has always been a ceremony, but some things have changed. Today, 35 years later, a movie like Alto Knights easily and quickly entered the streaming world after an extremely limited theater premiere—something similar to what happened with Clint Eastwood and his Juror #2. Even though the movie has similar features to Scorsese's criminal epic and also stars Robert De Niro, the poor technical and narrative qualities—or at least that try to decently imitate some of Goodfellas' greatness—are apparent from the very beginning. Maybe this subgenre is in the middle of a decomposition process and, if it is, this disaster is a rotten cannoli.

The movie presents a docu-style mise-en-scène, full of fake and also realistic archival images, camera movements that serve the idea that this is an actual trip back in time to the early 20th century New York and a blurry sense of self-awareness that inevitably fades as minutes pass by. Alto Knights is a story that lacks identity and ignores feelings. It's a copy in the worst sense of all and the last attempt of a director—in the twilight of his life—to tell us "Hey, I'm still alive." But the most echoing question or inquiry at the end is no other than:

Why are there two De Niros?

The legendary actor plays both Vito Genovese and Frank Costello, childhood friends and elderly enemies, with some features that distinguish them from one another, but that don't escape our imaginary interpretation. It's him, yes. The same person, almost duplicated. Why? For what purpose? Aren't there any more faces? The beginning shows us the violence inflicted from the shadows by Genovese towards Costello in a failed murder attempt perpetrated by Vincent Gigante (Cosmo Jarvis), his apprentice. From that particular moment on, the story goes back in time so we can understand how a life-long friendship got to such a point of betrayal, but it only digresses among judgments, empty conversations in pubs and a lot of expository dialogues.

Barry Levinson—who was a respected figure in the most politically entertaining Hollywood of the late 80s/early 90s—directed this reunion full of dinosaurs that, I repeat while emphasizing the tense, played in the big leagues. In addition, Alto Knights was written by 92-year-old Nicholas Pileggi, the scriptwriter of Casino, Goodfellas and more; produced by Irwin Winkler, an amazing decision despite him being 94 years old since he was actively involved in Scorsese's last projects; and photographed by the erratic—although having the majestic Heat in his resume—Dante Spinotti, who apparently devoted himself to watching some YouTube videos in an attempt to imitate The Irishman's textures, shots and several interesting details.

Made without effort, with moments that almost seem improvised and the feeling that the person in charge behind the camera had no inspiration, Alto Knights reminds us there's no gangster cinema, as we know it, without Scorsese. Unless someone steps in to create a new subgenre: the neo-gangster. But that's a topic for another debate.

Published on JUNE 17, 2025, 16:37 PM | UTC-GMT -3

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